 I'm going to jump in with the San Francisco Public Library announcements. I'm Anissa. I'm your librarian host here at San Francisco Public Library and we want to thank you for being here today and attending this amazing event. We are so thankful to have the McAvoy Foundation for the arts as partners. Today's event is a larger part of our One City One Book event which we have, it's our 16th One City One Book and we've selected author Chanel Miller and this is the story of her sexual assault and the subsequent dealings with the court and the judicial system and her surviving this and her growing and becoming a champion and advocate and all of the things she does that are amazing. Right now you can see her artwork from Hyde Street at the Asian Art Museum. So Chanel Miller will be in conversation with journalist Robin Takayama on March 16th. This is a one-time and one-time only event so please ensure that you come to the event, register or catch it live on YouTube but there will not be an archive of it so please check it out and we have amazing partners, we get to do amazing things with this event so please come check it out and we want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Eloni-Ramutush tribal people. I acknowledge the many Ramutush Eloni tribal groups as the rightful stewards in the lands in which we reside here in our Bay Area. SFPL is committed to uplifting the names of these families and providing factual and useful information as well as many programs around Indigenous peoples. So please come check out the library. This is your first time checking out a virtual event. We are here practically every day doing programs. We miss you and we encourage you to come check out our site and with that I'm going to turn it over to Susan Miller, the Executive Director of the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts. Susan. Hello everyone, good day, good afternoon and good evening to all of you. My name is Susan Miller. I'm the Executive Director of McEvoy Foundation for the Arts. I'm here to welcome you to this very special conversation with Celeste Marie Bernier, Judith Butler and Isaac Julian. This event as Anissa said is co-produced by the San Francisco Public Library and McEvoy Arts in San Francisco. Our very talented and insightful thinkers have been invited today to share an exchange on the life and legacy of Frederick Douglass, his view on the power and role of language and visual representation in racial and social justice movements and the importance of a few of the women in Douglass's life without whom he would not be the person we know today. This conversation is the final public program held in conjunction with the exhibition Lessons of the Hour, Isaac Julian's project on view at McEvoy Arts. It will remain on view through April 24th and if you would like to make a reservation please check our website at McEvoyArts.org. I'd like to thank our speakers as well as the leadership and staff of the San Francisco Public Library and McEvoy Arts. We are deeply grateful as well to nine McEvoy, Leslie Berriman, and the McEvoy family for their generous commitment to the arts in support of this program. Finally our conversation will include a question and answer session at the end. We'll do our best to address as many as possible but please share your questions in the Q&A button. Now I'd like to introduce our very special guest speakers. Please reference the chat for their complete bios. Celeste Marie Bernier is an art historian and scholar who has authored numerous publications on Frederick Douglass and Black visual arts traditions. Forthcoming publications include Battleground African American Art 1985 to 2015 from the University of Georgia Press in 2021 and Annamarie and Frederick Douglass Family Papers and Douglass Family Lives the biography. Currently she is in progress on living parchment artistry and authorship in the life and works of Frederick Douglass from Yale University Press. Bringing her knowledge and scholarship on Douglass's speeches she was a key contributor and collaborator on Isaac Julian's Lessons of the Hour. She's professor of United States and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Judith Butler is the author of more than 20 groundbreaking books that have been translated into numerous languages including Gender Trouble from 1990, Excitable Speech from 1997, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly in 2015 and The Force of Non-Violence in 2020. She is the Maxine Elliott Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the founding director of the Critical Theory Program as well as the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at UC Berkeley funded by the Mellon Foundation. And finally Isaac Julian is a British filmmaker and installation artist whose artworks exploring historical figures have produced numerous landmark projects including a documentary Dhamra on Langston Hughes which won him a prize at Khan Film Festival and others on Franz Fanon, Frederick Douglass and Lino Babardi. His work has been exhibited around the globe including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Venice Biennale. He is distinguished professor of arts at UC Santa Cruz. So without further delay I thank you all and welcome Celeste, Judith and Isaac. Please begin when you are ready. Welcome everybody. Isaac do you want to introduce us to this project and say a few words? Of course I'd love to do that. I'm just to say that I'm so excited to have both yourself, Judith and Celeste, you know, it's a bit of a dream come true. And I should say that, you know, there would not be anything of lessons of the hour without Celeste's Marie Barnier's scholarship. She completely led the way for me and her work for me was really, you know, I mean there would be no project without her scholarship and work which I'm incredibly indebted to and her generosity in sharing her sort of knowledge of Douglass was what really enabled me to make this project. So thank you Celeste. I'm incredibly excited as well, you know, of Judith being here as well because, you know, I've followed your work for, you know, a long time Judith ever since my early days in Santa Cruz in the early 90s and so it's a great honour to have you both in conversation with this project, Lessons of the Hour. And I would just say that in a way it wasn't really until, because when you're making a project like this, you're ostensibly kind of looking at all of these research materials but, you know, somebody has to make it come to life, you know, and, you know, with Celeste's work which and my conversations with her which brought the project to life for me, especially of course the relationship between debates around photography and, as Judith had mentioned in a sense, Douglass's lecture on pictures and his lecture on relationship to progress in pictures they were made for me to a certain extent thinking about my early works like Looking for Langston and the relationship between photography but I think obviously with Douglass I was very sort of moved by his language, the use of language and so and your work in relationship to that for me was incredible, your work with the archives Celeste was really phenomenal but I guess one of the things I was really struck by was his speech to Slaves of the Fourth of July and that speech for me is pivotal because it embodies so many questions around questions of citizenship, of, you know, nationness or nationhood and if you like the abolitionist slaves position that's so really articulated so I think, I don't know, I feel we should begin with that and we can springboard. Let's definitely begin with that. Yeah, thank you. And in the still darkness of midnight I have often been aroused by the dead heavy footsteps and the piteous cries of the chain gangs that passed our door to the American slave as your fourth of July. My answer, a day that reveals to him, than all the other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim, to him your celebration is a sham, you boast in liberty an unholy license, your nation's greatness, swelling vanity, your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless your denunciation of tyrants brass-fronted impudence, your shots of liberty and equality hollow mockery, prayers and your hymns, your sermons and your thanksgivings with all your religious parade and solemnity are to him mere bombast fraud deception impiety and hypocrisy, a sin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of sandwiches there is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than all the people in these united states in this very hour. Isaac, you know, I was thinking of course many of us have taught this particular speech and it's considered to be a brilliant example of rhetoric. It's also arguably a text in philosophy. It's also a political protest. He's complying with the invitation to address this crowd on July 4th but he's unable to celebrate with them. He's unable to make them feel better about themselves to placate them even the white abolitionists among them and yet it's also, it seems to me, given that this is part of your installation piece, it's also a visual experience that we have of a scene that you've produced for us so it is at once I would say rhetoric, philosophy, protest and photography. We have all of those genres, those those medias with us here and it's quite powerful. I mean it's powerful as rhetoric because he, I mean if you read the whole thing, he's he's saying oh you're celebrating but he's also not celebrating with them and he's also saying what could your holiday mean to me separating the you from the I suggesting that this nation, whoever the you and the I is here at this nation is still riven by race and at the time of this particular lecture radically broken by race and then it seems to me that the that you give a photo, you give a video representation of this that draws on on his ideas of photography but also your own. So we go from photography to video when moving from Douglas to Julian and and and it's it's quite it's quite remarkable to see it staged in this particular way. He seems to be of them but he's separate from them. I wonder if you or Celeste has something to say about that. Well I would say that a lot of the kind of theories in relationship to Douglas which have been extrapolated in Celeste's scholarship on Douglas that you know I was able to kind of borrow and I guess in this sonography and presentation or sort of aspect of the work one is jut opposing the question of kind of rhetoric and the kind of in a way philosophical sort of political sort of activism of Douglas and in a way transposing that with the contemporary contemporaneous events you know this work was made in 2019 it draws from you know both surveillance footage from the FBI and at the same time the sort of riots which occurred in Baltimore and you know doing pretty great rights and so there's a way in which ones are able to just oppose all of those things in relationship to this speech which I think resonates and pours out all of the sort of if you like the kind of difficulties of being able to have this Trump for this vision of the nation and to contest that from if you like slaves like philosophers position and I think there's way that Douglas really is able to give this as a kind of radical sort of proclamation which feels even to this very day incredibly radical you know it's not a kind of statement that one has in this sort of everyday manner necessarily so I think there's a way in which he's really through the use of language he's just able to bring this reading which is incredibly pertinent you know so yeah and I know that Celeste had many conversations with Ray Ferrand the kind of royal black Shakespearean actor who he is obsessive language himself recognized with the Shakespearean tropes in Douglas's work and all his 19th century aspects straight away but was absolutely I think beside himself in you know and Celeste maybe you can share those conversations and your ideas but I think it was this gave him the kind of interiority that he needed for this performative aspect so that's do you want to chime in I think it's so beautiful everything you're both saying Judith and Isaac and Isaac your film is just a beautiful beautiful jugular vein to the heart of Douglas's power is activism his oratory in his artistry and what I am in total awe in your beautiful film so many things but what keeps me going and inspires me on is the power and force of your beautiful film in working in so many languages so many performances to encapsulate the many Douglas's that is so at the heart of the conversations I have with Ray Ferrand too and thinking through Douglas lived by two convictions that language was life in the face of existential death that language was the way out of as he said my mental suffering in slavery was 10 000 agonies more than my physical suffering so language for Douglas as he described it was words as things as activism in the social justice arsenal but at the same time in his moments of pain and what is so beautiful and powerful in your film Isaac is you move beautifully between the pain of the public Douglas and the pain of the private Douglas and the power in that pain and Douglas himself said privately language is cold valueless and lifeless when I think of those of my people who live and die in slavery so what is so powerful and beautiful in what you create and how you communicate in this film Isaac is Douglas has many lessons his many languages and the ways in which he communicates his embodiment and his physicality and also his imaginative literary power of selfhood you know I would add to that that if if Douglas thought language was survival he thought photography promised dignity and and had this really remarkable view on pictures he wrote as you know a really important essay on pictures and progress the pictures somehow revealed the subjective nature of a person they render it objective for others to know and to recognize and he really believed that there was both a transparency and a power of externalization and photography that he could be known which is why he so willingly sat for so many portraits more photographic portraits than any any human in the 19th century the number of which exceed you know exceed um um exceeds um Abraham Lincoln uh the portraits of Abraham Lincoln so um so that's that's quite remarkable I mean he really did think something about humanity could be affirmed through the photograph even as he obviously suffered from pictures of him caricatures drawings but also photographs that exaggerated his features and were clearly racist even among the abolitionists who sought to defend him or to present his humanity he didn't want to be assimilated into that narrative of liberation and to be appropriated by those particular images and by sitting for the portrait it seemed as if he was perhaps asserting his dignity or gaining ownership over his own story I don't know if you would say he was successful in doing that but it's one reason I I'm I'm struck here by the combination of language and and visual both pictures and video and performance here and of course we also moved to song there's an extraordinary soundtrack throughout this installation we haven't we haven't talked about the acoustic yet but it's it's it's quite central yes I mean I think there's a way in which if we think about the sort of ways in which songs and pictures become this sort of way of really him having some kind of agency of being able to both kind of in terms of the narcissistic wounding which is performed by the apparatus of photography in terms of the general articulation of it in terms of producing these images which you know to the extent this to this very day that a population a black population is in a way still suffers from and then if you think about the ways in which he wanted to ingrain within this idea of you know himself being at one time a fugitive slave and then these early photographic images which had a kind of if you like fugitive image I think this is something that Celeste has written about you know that question of the ephemeral and at the same time his constant photographic himself I think this is an extraordinary really and his theories around of course constitute a kind of aesthetic theory if you bring all of the essays together on photography but I think there's a way in which if we turn to song I mean this is where kind of you know in Celeste's work I really felt this real embodiment of how the soul is able to transport itself and keep itself alive when exile to such extent to these other spaces and of course I mean you know there's way in which even in Scotland in Edinburgh where we shot there's a way in which these ballads which are now part of the fabric of well the history has Douglas at the centre of them in the send back money campaign and of course people look at the work and they think well what is send back money what was this campaign and what I mean really is this entwining I would say of the kind of trans national trans racial alliance in that he was trying to assemble in this plight for his freedom and in a sense was successful um I and of course I mean you know Celeste you've written about this you know so elegantly shall we shall we get the clip and Celeste can talk to us about it please send it to blast and weather Scotland's church yesterday Eliza and I rose at four and armed with string and staves and with Douglas quite laden down with all the tools we could muster without alarming the household we set out to climb a fair way up Arthur's seat Eliza chose the place and wasting not one minute we began to mark out our slogan me moment in your film is so spellbinding Isaac and the power and the force of it brings to life Douglas's many wars and as he said he was a veteran of every social justice struggle and at the heart of his work in Scotland he stands before an audience of 2000 people in Edinburgh and he is disheartened and desolate at how white people even those pretending to support the abolitionist cause commit racism commit supremacist violations and so he stands in front of them and he says send back the money know that in my bones in my sinew in my spirit and in my heart you are buying and selling my people so send back the money became the refrain by which he condemned the free church of Scotland who are profiting taking money from white enslavers in the US south and using it to build up their churches and his way as he understood it of working out who was a whole soul and who was a half soul in the freedom struggle and a way of combating the different ways in which enslaved people self liberated campaigners were subjected to violence and violation in a freedom that was in name only and so as he said it we may have failed to send back the money but we set Scotland on fire that's the last one I was completely I mean of course I mean these are all stories that we don't know about in the UK and you know I think there's a way in making this work of trying to bridge the kind of transnational Douglas and to try to connect that of course in its trajectory and routes in relationship to the slave trade which of course all lead back to imperial cities and in a way Douglas was there in that imperial city doing that work of undoing the nation in terms of its empire and its relationship to his being and so but I felt it was incredibly strong that you had these ballads you know and he often spoke about the preference to ballads as a description of the nation as opposed to its laws to such an extent as a description you know and the way of describing and rearticulating his sense of freedom sorry I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about the women who gathered behind Douglas or who supported him but also the women activists with whom he was closely bound up we know that he really cared about women gaining the right to vote becoming full citizens and he linked the struggles against slavery and racism to the enfranchisement of women um are these separate struggles are are there black women in this picture are all the women white how do we what do we think about this this part of his of his work and both the women who are intimately linked to him and his broader commitments to um the suffragists struggle so this is you know and so beautiful we have your breathtaking um still here of Anna Murray Douglas and so Anna Murray Douglas was mother Douglas as Douglas called her and as the children their five children called her and she was a political freedom fighter an intellectual genius and an anti-slavery orator and activist um who undergirded the Douglas family who we talk a lot of the Douglas voice but the Douglas voice is made up of Anna Murray and the um and Charles Raymond who we just saw in the last slide and in Rosetta Douglas and Frederick Douglas Jr and in Lewis Henry Douglas who together were the Douglas voice of intergenerational liberation and Anna Murray Douglas left us very little in terms of her words in the archive but the word she does leave us are words to live by one of the phrases that she says is why not I enjoy a hardship that my race may be free my husband is battling with the minions of oppression but I will keep my family alive and so Anna Murray Douglas sacrificed everything and as Lewis Henry as Rosetta as Frederick Jr they all knew that her part and their part in the white supremacist archive of 2021 in the white supremacist archive in 1895 when Douglas passes would obliterate deny their trace and Lewis um just a month before he dies um he fought as a distinguished combat soldier in the civil war and he finally died of his injuries many years later and in his final letter in his shaky handwriting he says no one knew what the distresses anxieties hardships and struggles were that we had to undergo in the struggle for liberty my mother gave everything she had to the freedom struggle no Isaac do you want to join in there no I mean it's just I mean I think you know the role of women in Douglas's life for me as encapsulated you know by less description in terms of the familiar sort of structure infrastructure that provided Douglas's agency and autonomy I just in a way in the exhibition at least this is something that I really wanted to foreground you know Anna Murray Douglas you know of course was not the most photographed subject and nor was Helen Smith um Helen Pitt sorry um who in a way I think was at the kind of um you know really created a kind of legacy as well for Douglas today and of course it was incredibly controversial that um he had a white wife you know but this is someone um who of course that I sort of learned um through semester scholarship had you know really you know um been at the forefront of abolitionist work um she knew exactly what she was doing and she created that kind of legacy of that transaction um of you know would be seen as transgressive interracial alliances um which would foreground um Douglas's legacy you know in the fight for equality and so and I guess you know there is a kind of repression I think um in um Helen Pitt's narrative um and the role you know that um you know this the the the progressive aspects of um the white race um had to play um in the liberation and the fight for abolitionism and I think there's you know so I mean of course you try to translate all these codes through photography through her intensity in relationship to reading and literature and the role of language um and how those are all used as a kind of force um but okay I guess it's a kind of privacy and intimacy and those moments um which I'm also trying to instill um obviously she outlived Douglas yeah so maybe um I mean I'm I'm struck by the fact that you know when he gave that lecture in um what was it 19 18 1852 what to the slave is the 4th of July it was to the um the ladies anti-slavery society in Rochester if I'm not mistaken and he I mean on the one hand these are the mainly white women who are struggling to abolish slavery on the other hand he doesn't want to be captured by them and made into a kind of icon for their cause so he's he's he's not making full solidarity with his audience even though his audience is trying to represent him or maybe precisely because his audience is trying to represent him um so there seems to be there's like some tension there and maybe Douglas also has an idea of dignity um and freedom I don't know if we could call it masculinist or I mean he did more than so many to think about women's suffrage but at the same time is there not a kind of masculinism that runs through I mean yeah I mean I think of course I mean I think there is a masculinity um or masculinist um aspect in relationship to um you know both his relationship um you know to women um you know in that sense you know he's a 19th century man and I think also at the same time there's a way in which he is um you know at the foreground forefront of trying to create these alliances you know which have their tensions because of course in the case of um Susan B. Anthony there is that historical contestation where he chooses his identity you know as a man in relationship to the race to vote you know um against the kind of suffrage suffragist core you know for the repudiation of those laws that would not allow women you know to have the position to vote you know and so and I think about this sort of gender racial hierarchy in relationship to the law and the letter and I think um ostensibly about the rerun of those things into the 20th century the 21st century when we think about Obama and Hillary Clinton when we think about the ways in which those get rolled out even currently between Biden and Harris you know they're all kind of their relationship to this question of masculinity and the gender role aspect and the political in the body political body politics sense um and so and you know I think in the work one tries to bring out the these different questions of um the role of modernity um the kind of way in which you know um you know alimony Douglas is you know in is able to construct the Douglas image through the her labor of creating his costumes um through the technology of the sewing machine and he's able to travel and have that agency on the train I mean there are these sorts of comparisons there's a kind of in a way gender critique that I'm trying to bring into the work um realizing that question of ability was afforded to him the relationship to photography was afforded to him um you know in a way that you know that comes at a particular price and so I think yeah I mean these are the aspects which you know are still reverberating I would argue you know which I'm trying to foreground in these kind of images and presentations um Celeste would you like to talk a little bit more on that issue I think the power of the film and the beautiful stills we see here that show Anna Murray Douglas at the sewing machine um and um speaks to the intergenerational struggle especially of the women in the Douglas family that as you spoke about so beautifully Douglas carries and um a person we haven't spoken so much about but he's in some of the historical photographs here is also Rosetta Douglas um his eldest daughter and she was a um here she is here and she from the age of 11 was proofreading and editing the North Star as newspaper and just before she died she's entirely lost her sight working on her magnum opus which was the first history of black radical feminism in 1902 um and one of the powerful life forces intellectually and philosophically on Douglas and his thinking around women's rights and you talk beautifully Judith about those tensions and difficulties and utilize that with Susan B. Antony as well the foundational thinkers were Anna Murray and Rosetta Douglas in thinking through in 1870 an intersectional way of understanding the freedom struggle and feminist rights that um understood and took parts of Susan B. Antony and but held them to account and were unequivocal around racist issues that carried through so the bleed through of the injustice through racism really is a foundation of a new feminism that the Douglas women especially Anna Murray and Rosetta were committed to. I'm reminded and I hope that this is this is true you'll tell me historically that Douglas um on the day of his death attended a demonstration for suffrage went home exhausted and and died and that was his last act which you know is is really quite remarkable um I'm wondering if we could move in the time that's left to think about the resonance of Douglas with the presence um throughout this video installation uh you you all all of you who worked on this um show uh the resonances you just oppose um lynching with um the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 and the demonstrations that followed um the threat of the police the ongoing threat of the police and even in um in the in the lecture what is um what to the slave is the 4th of July there is this moment where um Douglas although he looks like he's like this full human he's not yet emancipated as I understand it says in this hour in this hour this remains true he's not just telling a history it's in this hour and somehow when those words come through in the uh the gallery space where the installation is um um is is taking place um it's it's in this hour too in our hour in our very hour and maybe Isaac you can talk a little bit about um how you wanted to to have Douglas illuminate the present or how you wanted the present to illuminate dimensions of Douglas that may not be uh uh widely known well thank you Judith I mean I think there's a way in which you know making this work you know there was the kind of possibility to have a retort to the ways in which one was experiencing I think the kind of resurgence of a kind of hyperbolic kind of racism that became the kind of focus center for the kind of you know trump campaign the brexit campaign there's a way in which in the UK US sort of um acts you know access that you have this sort of real kind of return to questions which are kind of pivotal questions and all of the work you know that we're being involved in um I would say to work with you know um you know Stuart Horp or Gilroy and you know um Hades of a Carby I mean you know across the kind of you know what I want to call Black Atlantic world you have this kind of resurgent rearticulation um of a kind of vicious kind of um kind of racism you know in Europe and so I think in the making of the work what was really important was to how to coalesce um to um work with this kind of question of temporality and time um to um resupture all of these um moments both historical and the contemporaneous um to show actually that um this long march you know towards um equality um and but in a way I think also um in the installation and how it's very much influenced or interpolated by 19th century Salon hang it's really in the 21st century it still is to a certain extent images which lead a form of a certain activism and we saw that last year in that terrible horrendous atrocity um that happened reignited you know that how Black Lives Movement and so I think you know it's a way of trying to create this kind of synergy um in in works like this and to you know and the question of language and a kind of sophistication around the theory of the medium that Douglas had you know presented um in the eve of the advent of these technologies um which they resonate in such a peculiar way now in the new technologies as well you know and so um and yeah I mean it's as problematic then as it was now as it was then to a certain extent um one could say in terms of the way in which these technologies are going to be appropriated in use that both for and against to a certain extent so and these were some of the ideas you know which were in a sense inspired by Douglas's sort of speech um for me in the making of the work Celeste do you want to talk about the resonance with with the present um I think the the just breathtaking power of the film Isaac in how you do those staggering juxtapositions that cut to the heart of the life force of the Douglas we need today as his daughter described it in 1900 um thinks very much in and the fact of your calling your beautiful lessons of the hour which is a speech Douglas agonized over and exists in 10 forms and is a speech that he revisited just before he died and he crosses out the rise of the spirit of slavery which is what he understood as white supremacy white prosecution white torture white murder and he replaces it with the word the spirit of mastery and so his understanding of that stranglehold of vicious racism disenfranchisement and dehumanizing persecution to the day he died he understood and one of the most powerful phrases he says is as we go forward in the freedom struggle nothing of liberty humanity or justice will come to us except through tears and blood so that notion Doug was had of the ongoing fight in liberation as at its artery activism and art together as transformative is beautifully encapsulated in everything you do in this film um what one of the uh one of the videos that I thought was most powerful on that question of the the other sadism of white supremacy the relentless sadism the relentless cruelty um was the one where the hands were picking cotton and there's a sound of a whip in the background and I don't know if we can if we could show that I don't know if we're set up to show that but I would suggest that people have a look if they can I I also think there is some way you know some people say while Douglas uh didn't believe in reason or he was trying to get to feeling and I think that he was making arguments that led to an understanding of that cruelty so we could feel it but that it wasn't exactly um attention between reason and language on on the one hand and and feeling and and art in on the other I think that they actually were intertwined in a very powerful way so we are we're led through the argument to the experience um where we at least approach the experience of um astonishing cruelty uh and subjection and I do think um that this is part of the emotional power of his language um his lectures but also of Isaac's work which I I believe um gives us a history gives us a set of juxtapositions between the past and the present but also brings us face to face with the continuing relentless rhythm of brutality of racist brutality and we get that both through sound we get it through image and we get it through language um Isaac you we have it just a few minutes left you want to show us something or say something well I mean I just I mean I think this question of sadism Judith is so kind of correct I think you know in a psychedelic sense you know um you know questions of like sadism you know um desire and if you like the kind of pleasure which is kind of um extracted you know from it you know for um a white populace um who wants to retain power you know I mean I think this is one this is unquestionably one of the sort of aspects which is so kind of difficult to grasp and understand and at the same time we had such a kind of powerful um masquerade masquerading of that recently kind of in relationship to the axe which we wanted that the axe that that would desire to be committed in the senate you know and people have been arguing could be committed again and I think you know this question of um sadism um which is that that diagnosis repudiating you know um but is in a way painfully um and at the same time eloquently um articulating is you know I mean it is a kind of well it's both a moment of disavow generally in the culture but then at the same time in art when you're approaching it you're trying to recover that um in what I want to call the aesthetics of reparation um and so I think that's one of the things you know that I'm trying to um develop um in the making of those these works and images um so someone else is going to enter now to to take questions from the audience is that you Susan yes can you all see me we just have a few minutes here I'm you guys thank you so much you've touched on so many beautiful topics um and thank you Judith for jockeying here and providing so much interesting input to everyone um I wanted to take a quick moment there is one question the audience it's that's about the relationship of this the viewer Isaac um and uh and the um and the collective as it's presented on the screen so there's this this jockeying that happens between Douglas and others and between us the viewer and the work itself and how those relationships are embellished in the work I wonder if you you were something you'd like to say a little bit more about the construction of the piece and what you were thinking about as you played with those uh topics well I think it's really more about the kind of um being able in this um sort of um schematic visual sense have the sort of job as the job positions um which enables you to have this kind of multi um sort of multi access to time you know the question of time and temporalities which are co-existing and in a way kind of creating the reactions but then at the same time I mean one has all one's theories about a mobile spectator and looking and contesting the kind of linearity of um sort of films and what they ideologically kind of represent in terms of storylines and these sorts of aspects which you know keep a certain normative or conservative way of viewing history or sort of and so I think all of these things are in play in um the making of the work and the choice to have these multiple aspects when you're looking I also think like within my own practice I've been interpolated by the new technologies even in our screens we're talking now we have lots of windows open we have lots of screens all of this seems into an artist's subjectivity and work um and I think one of these things are also part of the way in which you can have a really original experience um that's very different from that of this more traditional cinema experience which is very unique to um if you go to the McEvoy you can have that unique experience thank you Isaac um and Judith a question for you so um might you and then Celeste there's a follow-up for you okay um you uh can you address how Douglas as the philosopher uh um first in in um with other thinkers before him and perhaps in his time how he fits in uh with a tradition of speech and thinking um that comes out of the 19th century and before that and maybe even touches into the into the present and then Celeste for you do you know what he was reading in his day um what inspired his speech and thinking maybe we can talk a little bit more about that I think it would be interesting if Celeste went first and then I could okay good good excellent thank you for the beautiful question thank you Susan um yeah thank you um Douglas was reading everything so a bit it takes me back to conversations with Ray Ferron to um Isaac where you spoke about and those conversations about formativity and performing Douglas um Douglas um read read and read and um he read the classics he read European philosophy he read ancient philosophy he read African diasporic philosophy um and for Douglas um as he said my thinking was my liberation and so his understanding was that the way to fight back and to win against the political objectivity that happened on the abolitionist podium was to reclaim the imagination and and his main philosophical influence was his mother so the person who read and read and read and who died at 27 was Harriet Bailey and she communicated to Douglas the urgency of philosophy practically intellectually and as a social justice weapon awesome I I think given that he did read widely in the classics and in enlightenment philosophy more generally and also understood something about American philosophy and emergent transcendentalism I I would say um that he was in a bit of a bind as a philosophical thinker because on the one hand he inherited these enlightenment ideals and and believed in justice and freedom and equality at the same time he saw that those ideals had systematically excluded so many people I mean not just the enslaved but the indigenous and women and so how how then does one re-approach those ideals does one throw them out as tainted or does one use them and re-appropriate them in order to expose their limits their dangers and their promise right and and I think that he was navigating that particular dilemma so you will find people say he's an enlightenment thinker I would say an enlightenment thinker who is a profound critic of enlightenment philosophy and um I don't know enough about his times in Scotland but I would sure be interested in knowing more about what he read and what he thought about what he what he saw there just just very quickly to add to what you beautifully said Judith um Douglas said to a Scottish audience your enlightenment is enslavement by any other name yes and then of course some of those key concepts re-emerge in another form for him as he tries to make formal even false equality substantive and realizable beautiful I think we're going to wrap it now it's one o'clock thank you all we could do this for many hours we really appreciate your time Anisa should I turn it back to you sure I will just say thank you and do know that this event is available on our san francisco youtube channel along with our past macavoy events and I want